Sorry, but I’ve wasted enough time on Google’s new Reader.

To put it as charitably as possible, it is an ugly mess. I tried to upload two completely different OPML files from two separate Google accounts. I get a reassuring message that says, “Your subscriptions were successfully imported! Your reading list will refresh momentarily.” And then … nothing.

Adding the URL for a feed manually results in a Preview window, where you have to remember to click the Subscribe button or your subscription won’t be added.

It takes dynamite to remove old posts from the reading list after you remove a subscription, and the reading experience is awful if you subscribe to more than a handful of feeds. Someone at Google has fallen in love with the elegance of their code and has lost sight of the user.

Yes, yes, I know it’s a beta. Isn’t everything from Google a beta?

The Washington Post has mind-boggling news from the great frozen midsection of the United States:

North Dakota’s Public Service Commission is exploring whether people [who want to sell items on eBay] must obtain auctioneer licenses before they can legally use eBay to sell merchandise for others.

To get a North Dakota auctioneer’s license, applicants must pay a $35 fee, obtain a $5,000 surety bond and undergo training at one of eight approved auction schools, where the curriculum includes talking really fast.

Colossally stupid going once, colossally stupid going twice…

Scott Kidder asks, ScottKidder.com: How Many Blogs Did AOL Buy, Exactly?.

The press release announcing AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. says the network consisted of 85 “topical websites” – which certainly sounds valuable. But Scott did a count of active sites – after eliminating personal journals, sub-blogs built from a larger site’s category feeds (like Engadget: Wireless), dormant sites, those that were built for events, and those that are infrequently updated – and came up with 31.

Hey, 50 is the new 30, so why can’t 85 be the new 31?

Meanwhile, Tristan Louis runs the numbers on the deal. When I plug my own stats into his spreadsheet, it looks like this site is worth somewhere between $140,000 and $225,000.

Please make checks payable to cash.

Mike at Techdirt calls today’s AOL/Weblogs Inc. deal (see my earlier post) “The Real Blog Bubble”, which sounds about right to me. And he has the same suspicions I did:

Also, to be watched, is how this impacts all of Weblogs Inc. authors who are paid relatively little without any equity participation. Some may get upset that the full timers at WIN just made a pretty penny off their labors. AOL may need to prop up the amount paid to keep them, further cutting into the rationale for this deal.

I worked for at least a half-dozen tech companies during the bubble of the late 1990s. In every case, with no exceptions, a handful of insiders at the top got very wealthy, and the people who worked for years building the product that was eventually sold got either nothing or a pittance. In at least two cases, the loyal staff got pink slips.

So pardon me if I don’t join in the orgy of congratulations over this deal.

Update: Rex Hammock says “Show them the money”: “Can something that is created by a ‘community’ of creators be purchased and sold without compensation going directly to those who create the, excuse me for the following word, content?”

Darren Rowse publishes a private e-mail from a blogger on the network, who says the terms include the following: “Bloggers will need to sign a new contract shortly … The contract will contain other features yet to be announced that are favorable to bloggers … There is no increase in pay mentioned but allusions to more money in the network due to the deal.” I could go back into my 1999 files and drag out similar letters. If I worked for this network, I’d be very disappointed right now. Been there, done that.

John Battelle says Google has stopped bragging over the size of its index.

Good. Now why not go one step further and stop telling us how many results we got for a given search term, which leads to the silly misuse of raw results to “prove” dubious assertions. Especially in courts of law, as in this Ohio case:

[The] judge who ordered a mother not to smoke near her 8-year-old daughter cited medical journals and a Google search that lists 60,000-plus links for “secondhand smoke” and 30,000-plus links for “secondhand smoke children.”

There should have been plenty of expert testimony to make that judgment. Throwing about Google numbers was unnecessary.

From The Onion (tagline: America’s Finest News Source) comes the shocking news. Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index:

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

“A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest,” John Battelle wrote in his widely read “Searchblog.” “Thanks to Google Purge, you’ll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music.” …

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

Be sure to read both pages. The second page has these alarming details about where the technology is going to go next:

Google’s robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: “The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it’s Google. It’ll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain.”

I haven’t checked, but I assume Google’s stock is up several hundred dollars on this news.

(Now waiting to see how many nasty comments appear from people who don’t know satire when it slaps them on both sides of the face.)